Category Archives: Water

Should Thames Water go bust, rather than increase its bills by two-fifths?

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Bad week for Environment Agency as ‘chicken poo’ failure claim lands it in court

Wake up call: these demonstrators against chicken farm pollution, including Feargal Sharkey, made their point outside the hearing at Cardiff Crown Court.

Yes, this is another ‘rivers of shit’ story.

But it isn’t about privatised water companies, for a change.

Instead, it’s about the Environment Agency failing to do its job and regulate the amount of – literally – crap going into our rivers.

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This is the second blow for the Agency this week, after it was found to have been colluding with the Tory government on ways of hiding whether UK bathing spots were unsafe for swimmers.

Now we learn that representatives of the EA have been taken to court in Cardiff over their failure to stop the River Wye being polluted with unacceptable amounts of chicken excrement from farms along its length.

Here’s a Sky News report on it:

The BBC reported,

The charity River Action, who brought the case, says laws to keep waterways healthy have not been enforced.

The Wye last year had its status downgraded to “unfavourable”, and the rapid expansion of chicken farming in the catchment area was partly blamed.

The Environment Agency said anyone breaking the law could be prosecuted.

The Wye flows along the English-Welsh border and is home to otters, kingfishers and the endangered Atlantic salmon.

“We believe that the government and the Environment Agency have acted unlawfully by deliberately not enforcing the critical regulation that, had it been in force, would have prevented the contamination of the Wye catchment area,” Charles Watson, the chairman of River Action, told the BBC.

And here’s Feargal Sharkey:

This Writer has something of an interest in this issue as I live near the Wye. The case is ongoing, and I look forward to the result.


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Is Environment Agency colluding with government to lie about bathing water quality?

The Environment Agency has been telling the government how to lie about the quality of bathing water, investigations have revealed.

Here’s Channel 4 News to explain:

According to Channel 4 News,

We’ve seen documents which show that almost twice as many English bathing waters would fail pollution tests – if the regulator [the Environment Agency] wasn’t legally allowed to disregard some of the worst results.

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Papers and emails show Government officials were also worried about negative press and wanted pollution incidents to be “better presented”. But the Environment Agency warned some options they gave could look like ‘greenwashing’.

The Government and the agency insist it’s perfectly above board and follows scientific best practice, but campaigners want the system to change, insisting public safety should come first.

Former musician, now clean water campaigner Feargal Sharkey has obtained a copy of the Environment Agency’s advice to the government, explaining how to – basically – lie to us about the amount of pollution in our waters:

In the TV report, an interviewee suggests that protection of the environment should be what the Environment Agency does, and not “spinning for the government”.

This Writer would certainly agree.

But it’s just another example of the corruption sweeping the UK.

It seems clear that the Environment Agency is not fit for purpose; when an organisation that is supposed to penalise water companies that break pollution rules is instead providing advice on how to hide such breaches, it does not deserve to continue.


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Water boss bonuses show privatisation is a gravy train for the greedy

Rivers of Shit: Boris Johnson couldn’t be bothered to think about the details of his Brexit, and now the UK is suffering shortages of materials including those used to clean sewage. So partially-cleaned and harmful crap is going directly into our rivers.

This is the second half of the privatisation scam.

Back on January 25, This Site explained how privatising governments like the Tories give themselves an excuse to sell national assets like water, electricity and railways into private hands.

They do this by de-funding the service to ensure that it cannot employ the right people, buy the right equipment and/or accommodate demand.

The aim is to make people angry at the public service, so they demand privatisation – or at least accept it when it is proposed.

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But what happens after a service is privatised?

This:

Water company bosses have received over £25m in bonuses and incentives since the last general election, according to analysis by Labour.

The analysis found that nine water chief executives were paid £10m in bonuses, £14m in incentives and £603,580 in benefits since 2019.

It comes amid outrage over illegal sewage dumping, with water firms in England seeking to hike customers’ bills by an extra £156 a year to invest in Britain’s Victorian infrastructure.

The blatant greed is staggering in the flagrancy of the insult to bill-payers.

Instead of using the money paid for the service to provide it, shareholders and executives take it for themselves and then (in the case of water firms, literally) flush that service down the drain.

And then they demand more money, under the pretence that they’ll use it to fix the problems they have created.

You’d have to be a fool to believe that one. So what do you think the Tories are planning to do?

And, come to think of it…

What do you think of the plan by both Tories and Labour to increase privatisation of the health service?

Source: Water bosses have received £25m in bonuses since last election, Labour says | Politics News | Sky News


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The UK supports public ownership of utilities. Why do none of our politicians agree?

Privatisation of public services and utilities has failed dismally. Why do both the Conservatives and the Labour Party under Keir Starmer support it?

Why are they determined to ram it down our throats?

We all know the problems with privatisation:

And we all know the tricks our politicians use to support privatisation:

So we all know that privatisation doesn’t work as a way of providing water, energy, healthcare, rail and bus services and the mail.

And when I say all of us, the polling is conclusive:

Here’s the problem:

At the next general election, neither of the main UK political parties are going to offer public ownership to the people.

You will not be allowed the chance to vote for it.

Don’t you think that’s, well… wrong?

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Your politicians should be seeking election on platforms that have public support, shouldn’t they?

They should have consulted with the electorate and they should be putting forward policies that we feel we can get behind – shouldn’t they?

Has any politician asked you if you support public ownership?

Have any of them asked if you support privatisation?

I’m guessing the answer is no.

Then, why on Earth would you vote for any of them? If they’re not offering what you want – and they very clearly aren’t – you need to find someone else.


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Sewage-dumping water company pays dividend bigger than its profits. What?

Clean water: but in United Utilities’ catchment area, the money seems to be as dirty as Lake Windermere.

This should be self-explanatory.

But does the payout make any sense to anybody at all?

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‘Judge us by our record’, says Tory MP. We did – and the verdict is not good!

Laura Trott: does she spend a lot of time with her foot in her mouth?

Conservative Pensions Minister Laura Trott made a bit of a blunder on the morning media round: she asked the public to judge the Conservative Party on its “track record” since 2010.

Here she is, saying it:

Peter Stefanovic took her at her word, and did just that. Here’s the result:

Social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years.

Untreated sewage dumped in our rivers.

Crumbling schools and hospitals.

Thousands dying every year on NHS waiting lists.

Let’s add a little more to the list, from an article published earlier today (September 18, 2023):

14 million people in the UK are in poverty – that is a little more than one-fifth of the population.

A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.

Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.

A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.

The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.

Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.

Rishi Sunak has also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.

Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?

Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.

Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.

Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?

Put it all together and you’d have to be demented to deny the comments in the following ‘X’ post:


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BAD HACKS: Andrew Neil is a sewage snake | TheCritique Archives

Andrew Neil: his slant on sewage-related litter on Scottish beaches smacks of deliberate misinformation.

A few weeks ago, my curiosity was piqued by a tweet from right-wing broadcaster Andrew Neil, as follows:

It was an innocent question; I don’t know anything about tidal flows between England and Scotland (why should I?), and there really is an awful lot of ordure being pumped into English waters right now.

The response I received was astonishing – particularly in political terms. Example:

It turns out I was right to question this information; I was just mistaken about the basis for questioning it.

Thankfully we have Martin Odoni of The Critique Archives to put us straight.

Here he is:

Note the pains Neil goes to quite needlessly to stress that the authority responsible for overseeing sewer overflows is a nationalised utility, subtly encouraging readers to imagine that the problem is caused by ‘inefficient public industry.’ But also, look closely at his claim and see if you can spot where he might be fiddling the arithmetic.

The Times offers a similar spin on this in its headline, but look closer at the text, and you soon realise we are being deliberately misled.

Sewage-related debris made up 17.9 per cent of litter on beaches in Scotland, compared with an average of 8.9 per cent on beaches throughout the UK in 2022.

– The Times

What the MCS have actually found is that there is an eight-times-higher proportion of sewage-debris in the litter on Scottish beaches than in the litter on English or Welsh beaches. That would only mean there is eight times as much sewage on Scottish beaches as on English ones if there is exactly the same quantity of litter on Scottish beaches. The ‘eight-times-the-proportion’ figure does not substantiate the claim that there is eight times the total.

It seems the real difficulty that the MCS was trying to draw attention to is there is a lack of monitoring of sewage outlets in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK, so we do not actually know the accurate amount of sewage debris on Scottish beaches, or even of litter in general.

There does appear to be proportionally more litter on Scottish beaches (492 items per 100m) than on English beaches (309 per 100m), but that information only comes from volunteer clean-up operations and so is unscientific.

“Moreover,” Mr Odoni adds,

the English coastline is 2,748 miles long. The Scottish coastline is well over twice as long at 6,160 miles, due to the considerably greater ‘zig-zagging’ of Scottish beaches and the extensive peninsulae, which would substantially mitigate the bare amounts of litter involved.

This is not to say that Scotland doesn’t have a sewage-related litter problem:

On balance from what information there is, there probably is somewhat more sewage-debris on Scottish beaches than on English ones.

But This Writer can wholeheartedly join with Mr Odoni in suggesting:

The snake-ish attempt by Neil to give the impression that it is eight times higher, and that purely to smear nationalised companies, is a vintage example of how misleading his brand of ‘journalism’ is.

Source: Andrew Neil is a sewage snake | TheCritique Archives


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Why you can trust Vox Political: Lords torpedo Tory plan for developers to pollute rivers

Housebuilding: but it won’t happen on the flood plains of environmentally-sensitive rivers, thanks to the Lords.

Allow me to take this opportunity to remind you of something I suggested when the Conservative government first announced its plan to end “nutrient neutrality” rules that protect environmentally-sensitive waterways from pollution by new housing estates:

They’ll be built on the flood plains of environmentally-sensitive rivers, and most likely without any of the mitigation measures the government has promised.

So when they flood – and they will – those houses will be filled with human “wee and poo”.

Do you really want that stuff to get into everything you own? Have a think about it.

It seems the members of the House of Lords did have a think about it (those peers love Vox Political) and threw out the whole idea:

So there you have it.

These houses would indeed have been built on flood plains or areas at high risk of flooding – so not only would the rivers have been full of pollution after the “nutrient neutrality” rules were scrapped, but your house would have been full of it too.

The developers wouldn’t have cared because they would have had your money already.

Oh – but now it looks like they’re not going to have your money because they’re not going to be able to build on these flood plains.

And that means they won’t be keen to donate some of that money to the Tories (which is what This Writer thinks was the whole point of the plan in the first place).

So guess who’s really mad about it? Here’s Tory MP Simon Clarke, who has indeed taken at least one donation from a property developer (I stopped looking when I found one) – and a response from a right-thinking member of the public:

And would you like to know the real joy of this Tory defeat? Here‘s the BBC:

Because of the late stage at which the government tried to introduce the change, it cannot try again in the House of Commons now it has been defeated in the Lords.

Ministers would need to bring the proposal forward in a new bill.

I wonder if they will?


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Tory government defiant after warning over sewage law breaches

Rivers of S**: unbelievably, the Tory government and regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency reckon they have not broken the law by failing to regulate this torrent of untreated sewage properly.

Unbelievable but true: the UK’s Tory government is digging its heels in and insisting that it, together with regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency, has not broken the law over how it regulates sewage releases into the UK’s waterways.

Here‘s the BBC:

The UK’s environment watchdog suspects the government and water regulators have broken the law over how they regulate sewage releases.

It follows continued high levels of sewage releases in England which topped 825 times a day last year.

Campaigners and opposition MPs have called the regulators “complicit” in allowing the pollution.

The government said it did not agree with the Office for Environmental Protection’s “initial interpretations”.

Following complaints to the OEP over sewage in June 2022 it announced it was investigating whether England’s regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, along with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), were correctly enforcing the law on water companies.

In response to the announcement the government said: “The volume of sewage discharged is completely unacceptable. That is why we are the first government in history to take such comprehensive action to tackle it.”

That is hardly an alibi as it is the first UK government in history that needed to!

As for the substantive complaint – that far too much untreated sewage is stinking up our waterways – the instinctive urge is to come out with a lavatorial expletive like, “No sh**, Sherlock!”

Except…

It seems clear that there is far too much sh** flying around – as much from the mouths of government spokespeople as from privatised water firms’ pipes.


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